Recommended: «Mute» by Raymond Luczak

This is a beautiful little book of poems, published by A Midsummer Night’s Press. I didn’t expect to be so breath taken by these poems, and that it would provoke such feeling of recognition and new thoughts in me. It is often hard for me to get something out of poems in English, because I often feel that I lack knowledge of the finer tunes of the language. But Raymond Luczak’s poems got through that barrier of language. I want to quote some verses from «Instructions to hearing persons desiring a deaf man»:

Writing like…

Ian Fleming, the father of James Bond!

At least that’s what the automatic analyzer at I write like concluded after analyzing my (so far) only erotic short story in English. I love the result! Erotica is literature with a simple purpose, and thus difficult to write. The language has to be simple and the genre conventions are strict. If my erotica has anything in common with the books about James Bond, I’m very happy.

There is of course the possibility that the outcome was a result of English not being my native language, and that my English really stinks. But I, of course, choose to ignore that possibility.

FtMs: Please help me documenting trans-language!

I’ve created a survey to collect words we use about our selves and our bodies. The questions are very private, but the survey is completely anonymous, so I hope you are willing to help anyway.

I’m going to use the results in an article I’m writing for my social anthropology class, and later plan on having published as part of a book. I think it’s valuable to document how we re-scribe our bodies to feel more comfortable with them.

Unfortunately, the article is going to be in Norwegian, but maybe I’ll get around to translating it some time. Both english and scandinavian replies are welcome!

The survey 

Language

As you may have noticed, english is not my mother’s tongue. And although my mother urged me to have some more english-classes at school, I didn’t like it and quit as soon as I could. So please leave a comment when you see something not right!

And if anyone would help me translate more poems, I’d be very happy. I can do the word for word translation (with the help of a dictonary, I know I have one, somewhere…). What I need is someone with a sense of proper english language, and maybe some poetic strings, to make the poems good literature in english as well. And hopefully my book will some day be ready to be published in english.